...more recent posts
In a follow up to the previous CDR camera post, ArsTechnica again points the way, this time to the Hitachi DZ-MV100 DVD-RAM camcorder. That's right. This thing records video in MPEG-2 directly to DVD-RAM. Wow. Frankly, I don't mind recording to DV tape because I always figure I need to do lots of cutting before anything would be worth watching, but recording directly to disc is pretty freakin' cool. I'm amazed they can stabilize these drives enough. Awesome.
By my own judging, I'm doing pretty well in avoiding the more contentious political battles. A few months ago I was so angry at the state of affairs here in the U.S. that I was only able to generate some rather negative vibrations when discoursing on the subject. And except for a little slip up last week at a drunken dinner, I've been doing O.K. There is some reason in trying your best just to be happy. Still, I miss the occasional good rant. Thank god Ethel the Blog has been holding up his end. And much better than I ever could. Go read his last week of entries. Way to go Steve. And I can really relate to the prize he is offering to anyone who can guess the author of a quote he printed:
"If anyone guesses correctly... they win a 'get out of hearing me rant about politics in a bar after 10 P.M. free' card, a prize for which many would trade their left eyeball."
Geek bumperstickers on the information highway I always laugh when I see this guys .sig on /.
"My other car is a cdr"
I really should get out more.
No frills tech news aggregator.
Mourning Sir Alec Guinness the Rasterweb way:
"The day was marred only by the loss of Obi-wan... sigh... Obi-wan said it best when he told Han: 'Let's just say we'd like to avoid any Imperial entanglements.' How true! A good Jedi, a good friend. The report says 'The spokesman could not confirm the cause of death.' Um, gee, I'm pretty sure Darth Vader killed him, hello???"
If consumers are getting their music for free now, I guess the government decided they can get something out of the record industry too. The BBC reports:
"State attorneys from 28 US states have filed a law suit against the world's five largest record companies, accusing them of fixing compact disc prices.... The attorneys have filed suit against Time Warner's Warner Brothers music group, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, and EMI.... The states are demanding damages running into 'hundreds of millions of dollars', or 'several dollars' per CD sold."I can't wait to hear what they will propose to do with the money. Programs to keep kids off gangsta rap? Free Britney Spears CDs for low income families? Isn't the market speaking loudly enough on this one?
The latest Mozilla (M17) is available for download. I'm grabing it now, but my net connection has been so slow and unreliable the past few days I'm not sure I'll get it. Netscape has also released M17, under the name Netscape Communciator 6.0 PR2 (Preview Release 2.) I'm just going to report back on Mozilla though. I'm still very behind this project (I mean spiritually or something, I'm not actually helping in any way.) But I don't have very high expectations. Lots of fighting lately, especially since the WSP published that scathing aritcle blasting Netscape for the slow progress of Mozilla (and demanding they take Netscape 4.x off the market.) Suck got into the action with their own brand of software review (i.e., lots of quips, not many facts.) Then Monty Manley wrote What went wrong with Mozilla, to which everybody and their brother on the Moz side replied (see Mike Cornall's There is nothing wrong with Mozilla in Linux Today as well.) Back and forth. The bickering is getting worse. If only the product were getting better. We'll see. At least you can play Pac-Man on it - take that IE. And surprisingly, my connection to ftp.mozilla.org is rocking. It's almost half down since I started this little blurb. Check back for the results.
Amazing satelite image of the lights of Europe. 300K and well worth the trip. For some reason that picture gets me all choked up. Our technological ambitions are breathtaking. Oh no wait, I just had my collar too tight.
Great dinner at Lupa last night (Thompson, north of Houston.) They can cook pasta. Not sure what got into me (barbara d'alba -> rofosco, maybe,) but I started arguing, a bit too loudly, my not too well reasoned "political decentralization as a prelude to space colonization" rant. Anyway, apologies to my friends who have probably heard this too many times. I'll try to take it down a notch.
Here's an article on filtering adds out of your web surfing experience (on linux, windows, BEos, and Mac.) I've downloaded their files, but am not terribly impressed yet. Perhaps I'm still doing something wrong. Wired is the only site I can find that it seems to work on. I'll report back if I get it working well. Would be great to have this ability. If anyone tries it on Windows, let me know.